Congratulations and welcome back, genius!
Your wish came true. You're in your eleven-year-old body, but with your twenty-six-year-old brain. Time to tear this timeline a new one, you unstoppable force of nature!
You're eleven, and first thing's first—everybody is going to be super impressed that you, an eleven-year-old, are already reading Hemingway. When Mrs. Sugarbee tells the class to take out your books for silent reading, that whopping copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls is going to send some serious shockwaves into the stratosphere. “Whom?” What a fancy word that is incredibly difficult to properly use. Everyone is swooning over your insightful old soul. You are so going to get laid.
Next up on the docket: winning the lottery. You previously memorized the winning numbers for the $1 billion jackpot this coming Saturday. While planning, you may have slightly overlooked the fact that you’re eleven and you’re unable to buy your own lottery ticket, or drive to the gas station, or have any actual money, so you ask your mom to buy the ticket for you. Unfortunately, you’re still eleven and your handwriting is dumpster trash, so when you scribble down the numbers for her on a piece of paper, she thinks your 22 is a 33, and your 46 is a 48. You beg her to go back. You tell her this is it, this is the moment that is going to change your lives forever and all she has to do is buy one more ticket. She stiffens. Sadness glazes over her eyes. “That’s exactly what Uncle Ronny used to say,” she says finally, “and he was a gambling addict.”
You're twelve, and you've realized by now that Hemingway is actually kind of a misogynist. You also have your own half-baked theory that he was definitely overcompensating for something, maybe a super tiny penis, but you haven't quite worked it all out yet. He was into hunting and fishing and boxing, which, alone, are totally fine pursuits, but once combined, become something else entirely. He was also into bullfighting, and that one raises a brow all on its own. So you’ve moved on to Plath, and Brontë, and Woolf. You are so going to get laid, for real this time.
You're fifteen, and you've done so much reading that they've actually allowed you to skip high school altogether. You're taking college classes. Everyone is finally understanding how much of a genius you are, and yet, your reward is an egregious one, consisting of isolation, and nicknames like “The Golden Forehead,” “Young Sheldon on Steroids” and “Loser.” You are so not going to get laid, because everyone else is at least eighteen and that would be illegal. You also realize you were never going to get laid before either because you were literally eleven and twelve years old, and nobody sleeps with anybody just because they’re reading a particular author (unless the author they’re reading is Sally Rooney, but this doesn’t really become a thing until the 2020s and it’s pretty short-lived).
You’re eighteen, and you never went to prom. While everyone else was dancing without leaving room for Jesus and receiving over-the-pants handjobs, you spent your days and nights cooped up in your room, writing and rewriting sentence after sentence of your “Magnum Opus,” or so you’ve been calling it for the past two years, even though it’s really just some hacky modern Kafka derivation. Kafka-esque? Kafka-is.
You’re twenty-one, and both reading and writing have lost their luster. You’ve turned to drinking and smoking and, oh god, watching daytime television just to fill the void. But this isn’t enough. You end up getting mixed in with the wrong crowd. Turn to a life of white-collar crime. Insider trading. Tax evasion. Economic espionage. That’s right, you do it all, and you’re the best, baby. But it turns out there’s one thing you aren’t so hot at: covering your tracks.
You're twenty-six, for the second time, and you've wasted all your potential, for the second time. You’ve got five years left on your cushy sentence. If only you could go back and do it all over again with the knowledge you have now. You’d spend more time on the important things and you wouldn’t sweat the small stuff, and you’d skip Hemingway altogether. But that’s the thing about Hemingway, about Sally Rooney readers, about everyone and everything: we’re all just walking in circles underneath the same sun, hoping that something as simple as bullfighting can be the solution to our micropenis.